MicrostockGroup

And when you design a billboard you can do it anyway you please I suppose. I however, find the image you posted far too busy in the background for text and would likely edit the image to darken it or even blur it so that the actual message stood out. You would then look at it as a bad photo so what are you gonna do?

I have often been fascinated by the different ways photographers and designers view images. Designers don't look for the same things as photographers. We look for elements we can use to create commercial artwork i.e. the photo is simply a part of a larger whole. Photographers like to see images that stand alone as good photos and frankly that can limit their value to a designer. I don't want photographers deciding for me what i can do with the image. It's a bone of contention for me and has been for many years because good stock is not the same as good photography. You expose it and compose it to be a great photo (and it is a good photo on it's own) and I then have to edit the crap out of it to make it useful.

I prefer leaf's photo with the darker background.

Sorry, I didn't mean to infer that would be a great billboard shot or anything.  It was more "here's how I'd balance the light".

I hope not.  This has been a really interesting exchange.  I have gotten a lot of useful info from your posts.  Keep it comin'! 

IMHO, the two smiles are ok, but the rest is too much the same. If feels like playing one of those "7 errors" games.

My thinking is pictures with lighter backgrounds sell more as a whole than the darker ones since these pics blend better on lighter/white backgrounds. Kind of like the characters really stand out as the light backgrounds recedes into the page.  Im not sure exactly what kind of work digitalexpressionsimages does, but the majority of the microstock images i see on ads online or print is usually the image itself just cropped and with text outside the image. I would likely bet that the majority of the images bought on microstock sites are just used as is or with a slight crop and plopped on some sort of a white or a light background with minimal design experience needed. Its also likely that dark texts are used more commonly than light text.

Oops, one more thought. For the record, light areas don't recede. Bright colours and bright highlights draw the eye. When I look at sjlocke's image the brightest spots, at least on my monitor, are the freezer door in the background, second from left, and the area to the right of the model. Try as I might, I can't keep my eye from going to that  freezer door.

Also, the goal is contrast. Form and function are equally important. You can't have a beautiful piece of work that fails to get the message across. That would be pointless. So, you would place text so that it's readable and therefore use dark text on light backgrounds and light text on dark backgrounds. But you want the text to draw the eye, not the background.

Lastly, as far as the kind of work I do, I would be willing to believe that i am different in my approach from every other designer in North America and perhaps the only one with more than "minimal design experience" but I tend to doubt it. These are basic design principles. I crop models and objects from images to use as I choose all the time. Which is maybe why you don't recognize them when you see them. I get ideas in my head that I reproduce and I use stock images as elements in those concepts because it's the message and the whole that matters, not the individual images. That's my belief, as I suspect is the case with most designers.

I keep coming back to this thread and posting even though I don't want to.  I did read your post correctly I promise but you seem to be speaking in generalities. Yes, if a page is light or white then a light background would have less contrast but if it's not white or light then your theory stumbles. I see all kinds of background colours in ads and magazines and on the web: dark, light and everything in between. Your use of the term "usually" just doesn't apply. however, I still maintain that the images in question are not so much light as they are bright and bright does not fade into the background. perhaps my use of the word light in my previous post was in error and I should have said bright which is what it is.


Have no fear my friend I did not take your words in a negative way. I only used that in my comments to demonstrate that I'm not really atypical in my views as a graphic designer.

Now I'm going to leave this thread alone. I think I've said everything I need to on this subject and in fact i've gone totally OT.